Kerb Falling

Last Wednesday, I came a bit closer to dying a daft death than was comfortable.

Because her car’s off the road, I dropped my wife off at the Art class that she teaches in Didsbury. I had an hour to kill, so thought I’d go for a little stroll, buy a paper, have a coffee and then go and pick her up.

I ambled down the main street in Didsbury, stopped off in the newsagents and then carried on walking. It was a sunny afternoon and time was on my side so I wanted to select my brew location carefully. Not too empty, but not too full (of prams or loud people). When I came to the end of the row of shops, I was daydreaming a bit and didn’t notice that the kerb dropped away. I stepped into three inches of space and went down like a sack of spuds.

Before I knew it, I was performing a primary-school-level forward roll into a busy road. It was my good fortune that I didn’t time my Luis Suarez dive at the same moment that a bus was passing, as I’d have been simply flattened, the bus driver would have been traumatised and one or two people on the bus would have took their Ipod earplugs out and said,

“Ooh, what was that?”

I quickly jumped up and experienced a quick snapshot of reaction to my tumble. As I got out of the puddle that I’d fallen into, a lad walking past gave me a quick glance and clearly thought,

“Uh-oh, pisscan alert!!”

He studiously avoided eye contact and kept walking.
Two old blokes in a van, waiting in traffic on the other side of the road were pointing at me and howling with laughter.

To be fair, I was in a bit of a state and must have looked a right nana. I fully defend their right to take the piss and would have joined in, had I not just had a brief flirtation with the Grim Reaper.

Another guy came out of a restaurant, concern etched deep in his face.

“Are you alright, mate?”

I gave the standard British Male response to his enquiry, despite all evidence to the contrary.

“I’m absolutely fine, thanks.”

I picked my newspaper up out of a puddle and threw it in the bin. Exposure to my own mortality hadn’t subsumed the skinflint in me, as I chucked it, thinking

“One pound twenty down the swanny!”

Through the power of Google Earth, I can show you the exact location of my mishap. It’s that bit between the two bollards and the lamp-post.

It’s hardly the Grand Canyon is it?

When I’d had time to think about it over a brew later, I cringed at the thought of my wife having to explain the circumstances of my downfall at my funeral.
With the embarrassment increasing slightly with each telling, she’d say to concerned relatives and friends, who were clearly trying not to laugh.

“Well… he fell off a kerb.”

“Oh! Was it a big kerb?”

“No, the problem was more with the bus than the kerb.”

“Oh..yeah.”

The Perpetual Poppadom Puzzler

We’ve used the same Indian take-away for the last ten years.

The Mahbub is a brilliant little place. The food is always great and sometimes excellent. The prices are fair and Amir and the lads that run it are always friendly. You can see your food being prepared in the front-of-house kitchen and they’re even nice enough to offer you a coffee while you wait (though only for main courses, cautions the sign!).

I love my take-aways and I’m a creature of habit. Once I find the right one for my pocket and taste, my loyalty is steadfast. As well as the Mahbub, Mario’s Pizza (till it closed) and The China Garden earned my allegiance through the simple process of not charging too much, getting the order right and knocking out lovely food that requires no preparation or effort on my part.

I only have one problem with the Mahbub and it comes in the form of the occasional freebies they chuck in to my order – or don’t!

There’s absolutely no consistency to Amir deciding whether to drop a couple of extra poppadoms or bhajis into the bag when I come to collect. If I’m in luck, he tips me a quick wink and says,

“There’s a couple of extra bits in there for you, Charlie.”

I say ‘thank you’ in a way that tries to convey surprise rather than expectation. As soon as I’m in the car, I frantically check my booty, then do a quick air-punch because I’ve got 80p’s worth of big crisps for free. It is a scientifically proven fact that stuff you have to pay for does not taste as nice as stuff you get for free. I’m not going to dig out the research, just accept what I say.

But then I’ll go in on another day and get nothing.
All the circumstances are the same. The order is similarly priced, I’ve not done anything to offend him (I think), but the poppadoms are not forthcoming.

He’s still friendly, but there’s no wink. The reassuring weight increase of the bag is absent. I go to the car and check and sure enough, the order is exactly as dialled in. Nothing extra. I might not have even eaten them but I wish they were there. Anyone walking past the car would think i'd just had some really bad news.
They'd be forgiven for tapping on the window and asking if I was alright.

"Yeah... i'm ok. They never gave me any complimentary food in the take-away."

This is the trouble and I’ve spent a decade trying to work it out. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to my likelihood of getting a bit of free scran. None of the following factors seem to affect my chances:

Size of order.
Price of order.
Longevity of small-talk conversation with Amir.
How busy or empty the shop is.
Proximity to any of the National or Religious holidays.
Proximity to mine or Amir’s birthdays.
Day of the week.
Time of the evening.
Production of a sob story about recent utility bills.
Casual reference to how many kids I have.

The dispensing of the poppadoms seems to be an entirely random act, beyond my ability to predict or guess.

Purely in the interests of research, I’ve purchased take-aways from the Mahbub an average of once a month. In 120 visits I’ve failed to identify a pattern.

Maybe it’s a big game that the lads in the Mahbub play. Although the customers are always nice, it can’t be much fun working in a hot kitchen all evening, so anything that helps to entertain whilst time is passing has got to be a good thing.

I can imagine, just after I’ve left with my little heart broken, despondent at getting seen off and feeling that Amir might not be my friend anymore, that this conversation might well occur.

Bloke Who Works the Tandoori Oven – “Bloody hell, Amir, you’re really messing with his head.”

Amir (laughing) – “I know. Did you see his face? I thought he was going to start crying.”

BWWTO – “You’re a tight bastard. You should go after him and give him a free Chicken Chaat. I bet you’ve ruined his evening.”

Amir – “You know the rules. I have to get him to the point where he grabs me by my lapels and begs me to tell him the secret of what he has to do, to consistently be given those little extras he loves.”

BWWTO – “I know, mate. But I reckon you’ve gone too far. Most people cave in after a year or two. This bloke’s been coming back for gone ten years. I reckon you might send him over the edge.”

Amir – “No, I know what I’m going to do next time. When he comes in, I’m going to shake his hand and ask him all about his family. I’m going to congratulate him on being one of our nicest, regular customers. I’m going to talk wistfully about my plans for the future and share a cup of coffee with him. Then I’m not going to give him the free poppadoms. As well as that, I’m going to give him two of those shit bags of salad that nobody eats. If that doesn’t do it, I’ll give up and just tell him.”

BWWTO – You’re a cruel man, Amir, but I like your style.

Gym Bollocks

It was my birthday last Saturday and I was lucky enough to be treated with a night away at a posh hotel. It was just me and my wife for 24 hours. With no kids and a criminally large supply of chocolate and booze, we were set for a pleasant stay.

To try and offset the imminent overindulgence, I headed down to the gym. I shouldn’t say gym, because the hotel actually described it as a ‘Technogym’. Intrigued to find out what this meant, I headed in there. It turned out that a Technogym isn’t somewhere that plays Pump Up the Jam whilst you exercise, it just means that all the equipment is really complicated. I wanted to do my usual 10k on the rowing machine, but I had to tell it my life story first. Many questions were asked about my background and suitability to sit on the machine. I answered them all stoically, did my row and got out of there.

This is why I don’t really do gyms. Because they are generally bollocks. The modern day gym is crammed with so many distractions, I’m amazed that people have time to actually do any exercise. While I was on the rower, I watched a bloke wander in. In the twenty minutes he was there, he did the following:

Had a drink of water.
Did a couple of lunges with major breath exhalation.
Watched the news.
Nodded his head to a tune on MTV.
Ate a boiled sweet.
Watched me on the rowing machine, seemingly assessing my technique.
Tried to work out the bench press machine, then gave up.
Looked out of the window.
Adjusted his shorts to get his balls just how he liked them.

He finished off by doing that stretch where you put your arm over your head and end up looking like the dead bloke from Deliverance.

That was it. A sum total of bugger all. He’d have burnt more calories standing outside and smoking a rolly.

When I was leaving, I clocked a machine that offered me a ‘Body Composition Analysis’. I stood on it for a couple of minutes and it printed out a page of results that I’ll never have the mental capacity to understand. Apparently my Segmental Edema is 0.331 on the ECF/TBF and 0.377 on the ECW/TBW. No? Me neither. I also have a value of 31.2 in my Intracellular Water. I took great comfort from the provision of this utter load of bollocks.

I subscribe to an old fashioned school of thought that says that exercise and staying fit is really quite straightforward. When I was in the army, the gym was a place of work. You tried to stay out of there, because horrible amounts of exercise took place in them, under the supervision of Physical Training Instructors, who could only be distracted by mirrors.

The fun never stopped and the sessions were cheerfully referred to as beastings. If you were spotted trying to get a breather, you were sent to hang on the wall bars with the other skivers.

For most of us, it was much more preferable to go out for a run.

To do this, you put on a pair of trainers and root around to find your smelliest t-shirt and least smelliest socks. Then you go outside and run until you’ve had enough. At the end of the run you can conduct a low-tech Body Composition Analysis by asking yourself the following question.

Am I knackered?

If the answer to the question is yes, congratulations! You can go home, as you now have some ‘beer in the bank’. This same BCA can be applied to all forms of exercise. That’s how complex it needs to be.
The true guru of exercise was Victor Comic character Alf Tupper, or ‘Tough of the Track’.

Without needing to wear enough gadgetry to land a space shuttle, Alf would beat all the monocle-wearing cads of the Amateur Athletics Association after working as a welder for twelve hours then eating fish and chips.

I imagine that if anyone had enquired as to his ‘Visceral Fat Area’ he’d have just welded them to his bench!

The Little Things

Like most people, Wednesday the 2nd of January dawned for me with the horrible realisation that it was time to head back into work. I’d had a great holiday with the kids and spent loads of time with friends and family. I’d kidded myself that this might just extend right into January and that everyone would think that I’d never had a job, allowing me to live 2013 in a manner similar to Prince Andrew.

I haven’t got a particularly stressful job. I don’t have to teach children, nurse sick people or dig holes in the roads during winter. I don’t have to spend months away from home, wondering if today might be the day that me, or one of my mates, step on something that changes our lives forever.

I work in that most magnolia of settings, the modern day office. I have access to a phone, the internet and hot beverages. I don’t have anyone timing my toilet breaks or cracking the whip over me. I have nothing to moan about.

But that wouldn’t be human would it?

Everything is relative and I moan just as much now as when I really had something to moan about. The cushiness of my current number, as compared to my life as a junior soldier, bears almost no comparison. This was a world where being messed about and having your life turned upside down at a moment’s notice was part of the job description. Any dissent or grumbling was always met with the sneeringly cutting response of,

“If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined!”

Which was right, of course. If I think of the difference between my world then and my world now, I can’t believe I’ve found something to whine about. But I have and it’s the IT bloke who sits quite near to me.

He’s not in my team and I don’t even know his name, but he sits just close enough for me to hear his conversations, both on the phone and in person, with his other IT colleagues.

I know that the IT geezers in any office come in for a bit of ridicule. When they were at university they thought they were going to change the world. Five years later, they’re showing bell-ends how to turn computers on. It must be galling. No amount of Star Wars or Goth band t-shirts are going to put it right, so an airy disdain for their colleagues is all they have to distinguish themselves from the rest of us.

That’s not what does my head in about this guy, though. Yes, he has some of the stereotypical accoutrements you would expect to see on an IT bloke’s desk: phone with a Star Trek ringtone; slightly controversial poster; nine monitor screens; and a mouse that’s different to everyone elses. He also wears an earpiece arrangement that suggests he guards the President. He can have all that and go out at the weekends with his mates, dressed like this.

I’m not bothered. If he’d just stop speaking entirely in clichés, I wouldn’t know he was there. He uses all the expressions that I don’t like, the ones that people use to indicate that they’re a bit cool and wacky whilst proving the opposite.

Here is an abridged list from last week:

“I’m not three bad.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“Morning, campers.”
“Not a happy bunny.”
“He’s thrown his teddy in the corner.”
“Do I not like that?”
“Exsqueeze me?”
“FYI”

He also leans towards the use of military metaphor whilst talking about the most unmilitary things imaginable. On a recent conference call, he remarked that he and his colleagues needed to ‘go over the top’ and ‘dominate the high ground’ with regards to a software update. He added that they should, ‘watch his tracer’ and ‘get some boots on the ground.’

I’m well aware that I’m being intolerant and that he is probably doing a similar blog today, where he vents his spleen about having to sit next to an ex-squaddie with a Mancunian accent, straight from central casting, who spends a farcical amount of time drinking coffee or telling people jokes they’ve heard before.

In a funny way, we’re helping each other get through the week and avoiding the fact that we’re locked in this room till we’re 67.

Simply Brilliant!!

Last night, I sat in front of the TV and felt a bit sad. There were no obscure sports for me to watch. I couldn’t pretend that I knew about judo throws or what the finer points of dressage were.

Like many other cynical bastards, I was completely sideswiped by the Olympic Games. I’ve spent the last four years sneering at that epitome of smarm, Sebastian Coe, as he and all his mates bullshitted us about how well our money was being spent. I seethed at the thought of people being laid off and hospitals closing, as taxpayer’s cash poured into London. The casual way that they announced, ‘Oh, did we say 2 billion? Sorry we meant 9 billion’ had me wanting to kick the telly, as it all happened with the backdrop of the rest of the nation, outside the Olympic bubble, trying to cope with the realities of recession.
I enjoyed the announcement that the security had been fucked up and the roads might not be ready in time, as it affirmed my belief that this was all going to be an horrendous waste of time and money. I chuckled when it appeared that passport control would be in meltdown and that some of the athletes might be in the queue to get into the country till Christmas.

And then the games started.

I still can’t believe how much I enjoyed it. All the points above are salient, but the athletes melted my cynicism cataracts away for two weeks. Because, in the end, that’s what it was all about. It was the athletes that continuously displayed the lost art of winning and losing graciously. When Jessica Ennis won her heptathlon gold, what happened after the final race? All the athletes walked round the track with her, slapping her on the back and chatting amongst themselves as if they were on the way to the pub. There were women amongst them who’d spent the last four years completely focussed on coming away with a gold medal in their hands, yet they were capable of acknowledging their defeat and congratulating the winner.

As a football fan, the scales fell from my eyes over the last fortnight and I don’t think I’ll ever watch my chosen sport in the same way again. Footballers in general have continued their slow descent into moral repugnance since the money of the Premier League put them on a different planet to everyone else - a planet where they could do as they pleased and still be considered ‘heroes’ if they scored a goal. The next time I see a player dive, as if a sniper has took him out, I’ll immediately think of Manteo Mitchell. He’s the American sprinter who ran 300m on a broken fibula. It snapped 100m into his leg of the 4 x 400m. He said he didn’t want to let his three mates down, so he carried on and still got round in 45 seconds.

How can I sit and watch a player holding his face when the replay shows no contact, without immediately thinking of Mark Hunter - the British rower - who had put so much effort into winning a silver medal, he had to be carried from his boat by Steve Redgrave.

The moments just kept coming. I sat on the sofa - barely able to swallow - when Gemma Gibbons won her judo silver, then looked up and mouthed that she loved the mother she’d lost to leukaemia in 2004.

Then feeling so sorry for the broken-hearted, Korean fencer, Shin Lam as she sobbed her way through an hour long protest at her controversial defeat.

For me though, Mo Farah’s achievement on the track is impossible to surpass. My kids already loved him. They’d watched him a few weeks before, becoming the first person to beat The Cube on a celebrity edition of the programme. For my bunch, this was something easily on a par with Olympic gold, so when he took to the track, looking like the most relaxed bloke in the stadium, he already had six fans in his back pocket. Before the games, I don’t think I’d have got a great response if I’d said to my kids,

“Right, sit down for half an hour. We’re going to watch a load of lads run round the track 25 times, when they’ll have completed 10,000 metres. Hopefully our lad will win.”

But, like millions of people round the country, they did watch it and were absolutely riveted by his performance. When he came round the final bend and we realised he wasn’t going to be caught, we roared him over the line. I thought to myself that this was a moment my children would never forget and I was already looking forward to reminiscing with them in years to come.

But he wasn’t done, was he? The 10,000 would have been plenty for everyone and we could warm ourselves for years to come with images of him hugging his daughter and wife on the track.

But then he had to go and win the bloody 5,000 as well. We had friends round that evening and before the race, we discussed the sombre facts that this wasn’t really Mo’s distance and there were a lot of runners in the field who’d gone quicker than him this year. Not that any of us had the first idea about distance running. The Olympics had taught us that nobody minded you regurgitating what Claire Balding or Michael Johnson had said and passing it off as your own, informed opinion.

With each of his steps on the last lap, we got closer to the telly and the kids screams of, ‘Go on, Mo!’ got higher. We tried to warn him about the Ethiopian lad who was going like a train down the home straight. He couldn’t hear us, but it didn’t matter, because Mo started going faster as well. Watching him cross that line was right up there with me being in the Nou Camp in 1999 and seeing Solskjaer’s injury-time winner.

We were just so happy for him and I’m not sure we’ll see another moment like it.

Now, I need to get back to being angry about Cameron and his cronies chucking all of our money away on sporting events, whilst they sell off playing fields and help kids get fatter, but if you don’t mind I’m just going to hang on until the Paralympics are finished.

I remember Ellie Simmonds blubbing her way through her gold medal interview, after she’d won the S6 100m freestyle in Beijing, so I think I’m going to have a bit more of that before I revert to type.

The Horror of the Upturned Plug

I was putting the kids to bed last night. The routine is always the same. Casey (11) grumbles that it’s too early, Bryher (9) invents a medical condition that only occurs at bedtime and Caleb (7) just moans for Britain, about anything and everything.

Once they realise that I’ve heard it all before and have no intention of deviating from my plan of getting them all sorted and heading downstairs to watch Alan Partridge, they give in and we can move on to the more enjoyable bedtime routine of inhalers, toothbrushes and daft questions.

The stuff they ask me never gets stale. It must be great being 7 and having a head so stuffed with magic, that you can just chuck out enquiries with no self-consciousness whatsoever. I never know what’s coming. In the last few weeks, I’ve had,

“Was Anne Frank married to Hitler?”
“What’s 247 add 283?”
“Can rabbits wear clothes?”
“Why do you always tell us the same jokes?”

You can see why I might get a bit distracted, whilst I’m sorting them out. The last thing I do before legging it, is put up the black-out blind. I know we’re not living through a blitz, but on these light nights, my kids aren’t content with closing their eyes or burying their heads under a pillow.

Whilst I was putting it up, I had the good fortune to bring my full weight down, bare-footed, on to an upturned plug.

The longest of the three pins buried itself just below the ball of my foot and generated my standard reaction to this level of pain. For a couple of seconds I just puffed my cheeks out and held my foot. The pain hadn’t actually arrived yet, so I just stared at the kids and they wondered what I was doing. When the pain did arrive, I ran through all the swear words I know and reassembled them in a random order, now holding the foot in both hands and hopping round the room.

After a couple of minutes, my sanity returned and I explained to the kids that I wasn’t possessed and asked them to kindly put away electrical items when they were finished with them if they wouldn’t mind, please.

What is it about the design of this thing? It looks pretty innocuous so why is it capable of inflicting such terrible agony on the sole of the foot?

I’ve had a dentist touch an unanesthetized nerve. I’ve been kicked in the balls. I’ve accidentally stuck a fork under my thumbnail when emptying a dishwasher. I had a squash ball hit me right in the eye, but nothing compares to standing on an upturned fucking plug.

I think last night was probably my fifth exposure to this particular treat and I’m glad to report that time hasn’t diminished its effect. Even that little bit in the middle was there, when you think, “Do you know what? This hurts so much I might do a little vom!!”

It has only recently emerged that the upturned plug played a part in the Nuremberg Trials. Herman Göring, Commander of the Luftwaffe had been a particularly hard nut to crack. Immune to all forms of interrogation, he was well versed in the techniques required to evade giving answers to any of the questions put to him by Richard Sonnenfeldt, Chief Interrogator.

It was a chance mishap in his hotel room that led to Sonnenfeldt employing a new technique. Stepping on the plug to his wireless, he bunny hopped round the room for a good ten minutes before he realized that he’d struck interrogative gold.

The next day, a resolutely stoic Göring turned up for his next bout of questioning, only to find his footwear being immediately removed. The door to his cell was then opened and he was presented with a floor covered with upturned plugs. With screams of ‘Nein! Nein!’ he was pushed into the rooms and the lights turned off.

The notorious Nazi food hoover, no stranger to the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Wolf’s Lair, was in absolute bits after five minutes, begging through the door to reveal all to his captors.

History tells us that Göring committed suicide the night before his planned execution. Sonnenfeldt’s recently released notebooks present a different story. Determined that there was more intelligence to be extracted from Göring he threatened him with another session in the upturned plug room. Ever inventive, he’d put in some additional items and they were enough to tip Göring over the edge. They included:

3 metal bedsteads

5 skirting board corners

A handful of Lego

and a single drawing pin

Use of the Lego and drawing pin was outlawed by the Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949.

Vehicular Trumpage

Doing a blog causes me to occasionally think,


‘Do people really want to know about that aspect of your character, Charlie? Do people really want to read that about you? Will it change how they look at you from now on?’

I go round in a bit of a circle, then emerge at the same point as always.

Nothing I do or say is original. All the things I like/dislike/hate/love are liked/disliked/hated/loved by everyone I know, in less, equal or greater measures.

There are aspects of our characters that we’d prefer people not to know about. Not because we’re particularly ashamed of them, but because we’re not sure what other peoples’ reactions to them would be. You may be the sort of person who, when on their own, likes to have a good pick of your nose, sometimes going to the trouble of rolling it up into a little, algae-coloured ball and flicking it towards the bin. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you’re never going to put that particular skill on your CV.

You might be the sort of person who likes to do a quick impression of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs whenever you get out of the shower.

I wouldn’t judge you for that, but it isn’t something you’d mention on a blind date, unless you wanted to get home early.
Which brings me neatly on to farting in the car.

There, I said it. When I’m on my own, on the way to work, I will take immense pleasure from having a good fart in my car. I see it as a bit of a treat. Of course I’ll eventually put the driver’s side window down, sometimes all four, depending on diet, but not before I’ve had the opportunity to conduct a thorough, aromatic examination.

Is this something I should be ashamed of? Well I’m not, so there! The reason I’ve come out about it today is that I met a kindred spirit this morning. It was nice to realise that I wasn’t alone in the world of trump-relishing. I was at the lights and had just got to the point where it was time to open the window, as my skin was becoming slightly jaundiced. I noticed a car on the other side of the road, with the driver’s side window down. He wasn’t having a smoke, it wasn’t a particularly warm morning and he wasn’t trying to get someone’s attention. There could only be one reason.

As the lights changed, we drove slowly past each other, exchanging a knowing expression, that simply said,

“I know, mate - me too!”

This unseemly practice does have a drawback. After I’ve parked up at work, I’ve perfected a bit of an elaborate walk from the car to reception, so that I can rid myself of any residue that might be clinging to my clothes, hair or shoes. I’m sure the security blokes must wonder what I’m up to. Usually there’s a bit of speeding up and slowing down, with the occasional pirouette or energetic wafting to increase dispersal.

However, if we’ve had the pleasure of an Indian takeaway the night before, the only way to get in to work without setting off the smoke alarms is to do a complete rendition of Michael Jackson’s dance routine from ‘Billie Jean.’